Point forecasts of the price of crude oil: an attempt to “beat” the end-of-month random-walk benchmark

Nima Nonejad ()
Additional contact information
Nima Nonejad: Nordea and CREATES

Empirical Economics, 2024, vol. 67, issue 4, No 6, 1497-1539

Abstract: Abstract The study of Ellwanger and Snudden (J Bank Financ 154:106962, 2023) discovers a new and remarkable finding regarding the ability of the random-walk model using the end-of-month price of crude oil to forecast future monthly average crude oil prices out-of-sample. The magnitude and nature of the relative predictive gains lead the authors to question whether any other model can “beat” the end-of-month price random-walk out-of-sample. I make an attempt to do so by relying on plain end-of-month crude oil price autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average (ARFIMA) models. These models are more nuanced and at the same time comprehensively account for one of the most salient features of the price of crude oil, namely, its persistence. Consequently, a forecaster is inclined to believe that they might “beat” the end-of-month random-walk model. However, out-of-sample results demonstrate that a uniform (definitive) conclusion cannot be drawn. On the contrary, conclusions depend heavily on the definition of “beating”, i.e. population-level versus finite-sample relative predictability, the forecast horizon, state of the business cycle and the choice of the crude oil price series itself. The decisions, judgments and dilemmas faced by the forecaster are presented and elaborated.

Keywords: Crude oil price; Fractional integration; Out-of-sample relative predictability; Random-walk model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 C22 C43 C53 G1 Q47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00181-024-02599-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:empeco:v:67:y:2024:i:4:d:10.1007_s00181-024-02599-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-024-02599-8

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().